Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy

Schmidt Number: S-4478

On-line since: 15th March, 2010

LECTURE IXDornach, April 24, 1921

In the course
of the last week we reflected on a number of considerations
suited to throw light on the spiritual condition of the
present and the immediate future. Recently, we have referred
in particular to the decisive turning point of humanity's
development in Europe in the fourth century. Earlier, at
least in the south of Europe, people understood the Mystery
of Golgotha to some extent on the basis of Oriental wisdom.
They still grasped with a certain comprehension something
that is viewed today with such antipathy by some circles,
namely, the Gnosis. The Gnosis was indeed the final remnant
of Oriental primeval wisdom, that primeval wisdom which,
though proceeding from instinctive forces of human cognition,
did penetrate deeply into the nature of the world's
configuration. With the aid of the conceptions and feelings
acquired through Gnostic knowledge, people were able to have
insight into what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha.
But the Christian stream that increasingly flowed into the
Roman political system and took on its form was actively
involved in destroying this Gnostic world outlook. Except for
a few quite insignificant remainders from which little can be
gained, this Christian stream eradicated everything that once
existed as Gnosis. And, as we have seen, nothing was left
behind of ancient Oriental wisdom in the consciousness of
mankind in Europe except for the simple narrations, clothed
in material events, about what took place in Palestine at the
time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

To begin
with, these narrations were clothed in the form that
originated in ancient paganism, as you can see in the
Heliand.
They were adopted by European civilization.
But there was less and less of a feeling that these stories
should be penetrated with a certain cognitive force. People
increasingly lost the feeling that a profound world riddle
and secret should be sought for in the Mystery of Golgotha.
For concerning the one who had been united with Jesus as
Christ dogmas determined by council decisions had been
established. The demand had been raised that people believe
in these established dogmas; thus, gradually all living
knowledge that had still existed up until the time of the
fourth Christian century passed over into the solidly
structured system of doctrines of the Roman State Church.

Then, if we
have an overview of this whole system of the Occidental
Christian church stream, we see that the nature of the
Mystery of Golgotha was enveloped in certain firm, rigid, and
more and more incomprehensible doctrines, and that any living
spiritual knowledge was in fact eradicated.

We are faced
with a strange factor in European evolution. One might say
that the fertile, living Oriental wisdom flowed into the
doctrines adopted by the Roman Church and became rigid. In
dogma, it continued on through the ensuing centuries. This
dogma existed. One must remember that there were some people
who to some extent knew what to make of these dogmas, but it
had become impossible for the general consciousness of
humanity to receive anything but a dead form. Certainly, we
encounter a number of splendid minds. We need only to recall
some of those who came from the Irish centers of knowledge;
we need only recall Scotus Erigena who lived at the court of
Charles the Bald.
[Note 1]
In individuals like him, we have people who received the
doctrines and still sensed the spirit in them, or discovered
it more or less. Then we have scholasticism, often mentioned
here in a certain connection, which attempted in a more
abstract form to penetrate the doctrines with its thinking.
We face the fact that an extensive system of religious
content was present in rigidified doctrines and was handed
down from generation to generation; it survived as a system
of dogmas. On the one hand, there were the theological
dogmas, on the other, the narrations concerning the events of
Palestine clothed in materialistic pictures.

Now, if we
wish to comprehend our modern age, we must not forget what
these Roman-Catholic dogmas couched in Roman political
concepts are fundamentally all about. Among them are
doctrines of great significance, splendid doctrines. There
is, above all, the doctrine of the Trinity, which, in other
terminology of later times, points to the Father, the Son,
and the Spirit. An ancient and profound primordial wisdom was
frozen into this doctrine, something great and mighty that
human perception once possessed instinctively. Yet, only the
brilliant, inspired insight of a few could fathom what is
contained in such a doctrine.

Running
through the various council resolutions, there was what
finally rigidified into the dogma of the two persons of
Christ and Jesus in one man. There were dogmas concerning the
birth, the nature of Christ Jesus, the death, the
Resurrection, and the Ascension. Finally, there were dogmas
establishing the various festivals; and all this was
basically the skeleton, the silhouette of a wondrous, ancient
wisdom. Now this shadowy image, this skeleton, continued on
through the centuries. One particular reason why it was able
to go on was that it assumed a certain form of ancient cults.
The content of what was thus expressed in dogmas, in the most
sublime dogmas, such as the dogma of the transubstantiation
of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ,
could spread because it was clothed in the form of an
ancient, sacred cult, namely, the Sacrifice of the Mass. The
ancient cult was just altered a bit but as such continued on.
The various metamorphoses of the Christian festivals lived on
through the whole ecclesiastical year. Those aspects lived on
that you know as the sacraments. They were intended to lift
the human being out of the ordinary material life through the
agency of the Church, so to speak, into a higher, spiritual
sphere. Because of all this and because of its link with the
impulse of Christianity, this content lived on throughout the
centuries of historical development in Europe. Side by side
with this, as I have said, existed the humble narration of
the events in Palestine, but garbed in materialistic
formulas.

Because of
its significant content and because people basically had
nothing else with which to establish a relationship to the
super-sensible worlds, all these doctrines together were
something that affected minds striving for such higher
knowledge. Due to the ritual and the simple narration of the
Gospel, however, these doctrines could also unfold that form
of activity that gained influence over the broad masses of
Europe's population.

In addition
to this, another separate and different cult system spread,
one that counted less on Christianity as such but frequently
accepted it. It was basically not organically connected with
Christianity but proceeded more from older cults. This other
system culminated in the dogma of present day Freemasonry,
which, indeed, had and still has only a superficial
relationship to Christianity. As you know, the element that
clothed itself in the form of Roman-Catholic dogmatism and
the element that in Masonic tradition is linked to other
cults and symbolism fight each other tooth and nail to this
day.

This
development can be traced more or less if only we focus our
soul on the historical facts with some sense. But what
presents itself can be fully comprehended only when we look
to that turning point of European evolution in the fourth
Christian century that, in a sense, sank all the ancient
spiritual wisdom and its aftereffects into a sort of abyss.
Due to that, people in Europe knew little of Oriental
primeval wisdom throughout the ensuing centuries.

As I pointed
out yesterday, the inner faculties that enabled human beings
in ancient times to experience weight, number, and measure in
their own being had gradually disappeared. Measure, numbers,
and weight then turned into abstractions. With these
abstractions, people then established in the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch what has today become our natural
scientific world view, something that could not include human
beings in its sphere and stopped short of them, unable in any
way to comprehend them. By means of the abstractions of
weight, number, and measure, it did, however, grasp the
external natural phenomena with a certain excellence and
arrived at a kind of culmination point in the nineteenth
century.

People today
do not yet have enough distance from these matters; they do
not yet realize that a quite special point in time was
actually reached in European development in the middle of the
nineteenth century. Intellectual striving, pure rational
effort, attained to its fullest and greatest unfolding at
that time. It was the trend that resulted from those same
sources from which the modern natural scientific views have
been flowing since the first third of the fifteenth century.
Yet, at the same time, this was the trend that ultimately
could no longer make anything of the cult that had spread;
indeed, this trend basically had been unable for a long time
to do anything with the ritual and dogmatic formulas
established by the Church councils. Merely a few vestiges had
survived, a few remnants; for example, the vestige of the
Council of 869,
[Note 2]
where it had been resolved that the human being consists not
of body, soul, and spirit, but merely of body and soul, with
the latter possessing a few spiritual qualities. This vestige
remained and lived on in the modern philosophical views that
believed themselves to be objective but actually only
reiterated what had originated in this Catholic
dogmatism.

The modern
mood of European civilization, which tended increasingly to a
purely intellectual, rational view of the universe, formed
out of all these directions. Having been prepared for
centuries, this mood reached its culmination in the middle of
the nineteenth century. How can we understand this
culmination if we observe the human being from a
soul-spiritual standpoint? We have to focus on human nature,
as it was in ancient times and as it has gradually changed.
We have done this already from a number of different
viewpoints and shall do so again today from yet a certain
other standpoint.

Let us place
the human being schematically before us. Take, first of all,
man's physical body (red). As I said, I am making a schematic
drawing.

This is man's
etheric body (blue); that is the human astral body (yellow);
here we have man's ego. Let us first consider the human being
as he was in ancient times, those ancient times when
instinctive clairvoyance still existed, which then faded,
withered, and gradually disappeared. The ego is basically a
product of the earth and we need to give it less
consideration. But we must be clear about the fact that the
whole world actually dwells in man's physical, etheric, and
astral bodies. We can say, in this physical body lives the
element that represents the whole world. The corporeality is
born out of it and continues to reconstruct itself through
the intake of nourishment. In the etheric body, the whole
world lives as well; in the most diverse ways, influences
enter constantly into it and send their effects into the
human being in a superphysical manner, effects that express
themselves in the forces of growth, for example in the
circulation of the blood, in the breath, and so on. They are
by no means identical with the forces that are present in the
intake of food and in digestion. In addition, there are all
the influences living in our astral body that receive
impressions from the world through the senses, and so forth.
It is like this to this day and was like this in the days
when the human being still lived with his ancient instinctive
clairvoyance, but in that age, he was more intimately
connected with his physical body, his etheric, and astral
bodies than he is today. When he woke up in the morning, he
submerged with his ego and astral body into his physical and
etheric bodies. A close connection developed between his ego
and astral body and his etheric body and physical
corporeality. And he not only dwelled in his physical body,
he also lived in the forces that worked within the
latter.

Let me give
you a vivid description of this. Imagine that a person
possessing ancient clairvoyance ate a plum. It seems almost
grotesque to a human being of today when something like this
is described, but it is profoundly true. Assume that such an
ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; this plum contains etheric
forces. If a person eats a plum today, he is not aware of
what goes on within this plum. The ancient clairvoyant ate a
plum; it was then in his stomach, was digested, and he
experienced how the etheric forces in the plum passed over
into his body. He cosmically participated in this experience.
When he inwardly made comparisons between the various things
he ingested into his stomach, he saw that all the
relationships in the outside world continued inside the human
being, and he perceived them inwardly. From waking in the
morning to going to sleep at night, such a person was filled
with the vivid inner perception of the life lived outside by
the plums, by the apples, and by much else that he ate.
Inwardly, through the breathing process, he was aware of the
essential, spiritual being of the air. Through the warmth
that coursed through his circulation process, he was familiar
with the warmth forces of the cosmos in his surroundings. He
did not stop short at merely sensing the light in his eyes.
He felt how the light rays streamed in through the nerves of
his eyes; how, in his own etheric body, they encountered the
physical limbs and dwelled within them.

Such a person
experienced himself quite concretely within the cosmic
element. While it was a dim consciousness, it was present.
During the day, it was muted by what a person perceived
outwardly even in those days. But even in the early times of
Greek civilization, it was true that human beings still
retained an aftereffect of what is possessed today only by
creatures other than man. I have already mentioned several
times that it is most interesting to look with spiritual
sight upon a meadow where cows are lying down and digesting.
This whole activity of digestion is a cosmic experience for
the cows. It is even more so the case with snakes; they lie
down and digest and do indeed experience cosmic events. Out
of their organism, something blossoms and sprouts that is
“world” to their perception. Something arises out
of their inner being that is much more beautiful than
anything we are ever able to see with our eyes from outside.
Something like this was present as an underlying mood in
human beings who still possessed ancient, instinctive
clairvoyance. While it was muted throughout most of the day
by external perceptions, when these people fell asleep, they
carried with them what they had thus experienced and received
into their astral body and ego. Then, when their ego was
alone with its astral body, these experiences arose
powerfully in the form of true dreams. Then, in the form of
true dreams, these people experienced after the fact what
they had only dimly experienced during the day.

You see, I am
referring you to the inner soul-bodily manner of experiencing
on the part of human beings of ancient times; because they
were able to experience in this way, they had cosmic
experiences. It was in this that they found their cosmic,
super-sensible perception. Then, when people in the Orient
drank the Soma drink,
[Note 3]
they knew the nature of the Spirit of the Heights. This Soma
drink permeated, surged, and wove through their inner being,
enlivening their blood. When these people subsequently fell
asleep and the ego and astral body, which had been active in
the blood, took along the forms that had come into being
through the digestion of the Soma drink, then their being
widened out in the widths of space and, in their nocturnal
experience, they felt the spiritual beings of the cosmos.

Such an
experience was still present in those among whom the ancient
Zarathustra found willing listeners in the ancient Persian
epoch. If one is unaware of these things, one does not
understand what finally came down to us from the Oriental
scriptures that have survived. This living cosmic perception
gradually became extinguished. Already in the historical
Egyptian age, little of it can be found, only its
aftereffects are still present. And except for final vestiges
that have always been retained among primitive human beings,
it then disappeared in the fourth Christian century. From
then on, the intellect, the rational element, increasingly
struggled to come to the fore in the human being, the element
that is completely tied to the mere physical body in its
isolation from the world.

If you have a
pictorial imagination and enter into your body, you cannot
help but experience something cosmic. If you have retained
something of the inner quality of numbers and enter into your
body with it, you cannot help but experience the number
element of the cosmos. The same is true for the ratios of
weight. However, if you enter into the human organism with
the power of the ego, which is active as a purely rational,
intellectual element, then you immerse yourself only in the
isolated human body, in what the human body is by virtue of
its own nature, without its relationship to the cosmos. You
enter into the earthly human body in its total isolation.
Thus, if I would try to sketch this from the point of view of
the intellect, I would have to do it like this:

The etheric
body, the astral body, and the ego (see above, blue, yellow,
and shape in the middle) are present there too. But the ego
no longer experiences anything of the cosmic element here
within the human being. It only has a dim experience of its
own existence, of its own immersion in the isolated human
organism. Therefore, when this purely intellectual ego goes
into its surroundings in sleep, it takes nothing along. The
fact that it takes along nothing is the reason that at most
reminiscences, dream images of an unrealistic kind, can arise
in the human being, and that this ego can in no way be
permeated by anything from the cosmos. Basically, from the
moment of falling asleep until awakening, the human being
experiences nothing of significance, because his whole manner
of experiencing is calculated for the isolated human
organism, which in turn affects the ego with those forces
that have nothing to do with the cosmos. This is why the ego
is dulled from the moment of falling asleep until waking
up.

Indeed, it
must be so, for though instinctively clairvoyant ancient
human beings possessed cosmic vision and dwelled in
instinctive Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions, they
possessed no independent rational thinking. If this
independent rational thinking, this actual intellectual
thinking, is to develop, it has to make use of the instrument
of the isolated human body. It has to be dull during sleep
and therefore brings nothing along when it awakens. The
ancient human being, on the other hand, having carried his
experiences in the body out into the cosmos, brought with him
what he had experienced in the encounter of the cosmic
aftereffects with the actual spiritual-cosmic occurrences out
there. Again, he brought back aftereffects of what he had
experienced there and thus enjoyed a lively relationship with
the cosmos. What is attained by the human being through
intellectual thinking is acquired in the period from waking
up until falling asleep and dims down after sleep begins.
Human beings now have to depend on the time when they are
awake.

We come
across the strange phenomenon that in ancient times the human
being was bound more to his body than he is today, but that
he experienced in this body the spiritual aspect of the
cosmos. Modern man has lost this experience in the body. The
human being today is more spiritual but he has the most
rarefied spirit; he lives in the intellect and can dwell in
the spirit only from the time he awakens until he falls
asleep. When he enters the spiritual world with his
completely rarefied intellectual spirit, his consciousness is
dimmed.

Why have we
developed materialism? And why did ancient humanity not have
materialism? The ancients did not have it because they
dwelled within the matter of the body; modern men have
materialism because they dwell only in the spirit, because
they are completely free of a cosmic connection to their
body. Materialism actually comes about because the human
being became spiritual, but spiritual in a rarefied manner.
People were most spiritual during the mid-nineteenth century.
But they lied to themselves in an ahrimanic way inasmuch as
they did not recognize that it was the rarefied spirit in
which they dwelled. Into the most spiritual element possible
for the human being, he only absorbed the concept of
materiality. The human being had turned into a completely
spiritual vessel, but into this vessel he only let flow the
thoughts of material existence. It is the secret of
materialism that human beings turned to matter because of
their spirituality. This is modern man's negation of his own
spirituality. The culmination point of this spiritual
condition was in the middle of the nineteenth century, but
human beings did not grasp this condition of
spirituality.

As I said,
this developed slowly through the centuries. The ancient
instinctive spirituality had slowly died down in the fourth
Christian century; beginning in the first third of the
fifteenth century, the new spirituality dawned; the time
between is in a sense an episode of purely human experience.
Now, however, after this point in time in the first third of
the fifteenth century and after that century as a whole this
dependence of man on his isolated physical body made itself
felt. Now he no longer developed any relationship to what was
frozen into dogmatic council doctrines and what, although
rigidified, still possessed a grandiose content. Now, too,
human beings basically could no longer find any relationship
to the humble narrations of Palestine. For a while yet, they
forced themselves to connect some meaning with them. However,
meaning can be connected with them only when they are
penetrated by knowledge. In particular, modern human beings
no longer could connect any meaning with the cults, the
ritual itself. The Sacrifice of the Mass, a religious act of
the greatest cosmic significance, turned into an external,
symbolic act because it was no longer understood. The
sacrament of the Transubstantiation, which had survived
through the Middle Ages and which has profound cosmic
significance, became part of purely intellectual disputes.
Certainly it goes without saying that when people began to
question with their isolated intellect how the Christ could
be contained in the sacraments of the altar, they could not
comprehend it, for these matters are not suited for
comprehension by the intellect. But now human beings began to
try to understand them by means of the intellect.

This then led
to the emergence of debates of great importance in world
history known as the
“Eucharist-Dispute,”
[Note 4]
and linked to names like Hus
[Note 5]
and others. The most progressive individuals in Europe, those
most advanced in the rational comprehension of the world,
then arrived at the various forms of Protestantism. It is the
intellect's reaction against something that had emerged from
a much broader, much more intense power of cognition than is
the intellect itself. The powers that had developed in the
modern soul as intellectual faculties and what dwelled in the
rigid dogmas yet containing something great and mighty, these
two confronted each other as two alien views! Protestant
confessions of the greatest variety arose as compromises
between the intellect and the ancient traditions. The
sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
passed, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the human
being reached the culmination of his intellectual
development. He became a spiritual being through and
through.

With this
spirituality, he could comprehend what exists in the outer,
sensory world, but he did not comprehend himself as spirit.
People hardly had an inkling any longer of the meaning of a
sentence such as the one by Leibnitz that states,
“Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell
earlier in the senses, except for the intellect itself.”
[Note 6]
Modern people completely omitted the phrase at the end and
acknowledged only the sentence, “Nothing dwells in the
intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses,”
whereas Leibnitz clearly discerned that the intellect is
something totally spiritual at work in the human being quite
independently of all aspects of the physical
corporeality.

As I have
said, the intellect was active but did not recognize itself.
Thus, it has been our experience that human beings are now in
the transition to another phase of development in their life,
and, so to speak, they carry nothing out with them into the
night. For what is intellectually acquired is attained
through the body and has no relationship to what is outside
the body. People now have to work their way anew into the
spiritual world. The possibility distinctly exists for them
to look into this spiritual world. What people earlier had
attained from their physical and etheric bodies as well as
from their astral body in regard to an instinctive view of
the cosmos can be attained again today. We can come to
Imaginations and by means of them we can describe the world
evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon, to earth, and so on. We can
behold what dwells in the nature of numbers, namely, the
being of numbers. Through Inspirations, we can receive
insight into how the world is shaped out of cosmic
spirituality according to the laws of numbers. It is entirely
possible that we can have insight into the world in this way
through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

Most people
will say: If we have not ourselves become clairvoyant, we can
at most study these matters. Good and well, but one
can study them, and it has been said again and again
that the ordinary intellect can grasp them. Today, I shall
add the reason why the ordinary intellect is able to grasp
these matters. Assume that you are reading something like
An Outline of Occult Science.
Imagine that you try
to place yourself into these descriptions with your ordinary
intellect. You take it in with the intellect, which is only
linked to the isolated human body. But you do take something
in that you could not receive through this intellect, since
throughout the past few centuries this intellect did not
comprehend itself. Now you take something in that is
incomprehensible on the basis of those concepts that the
intellect derives from the external sense world. It does
become comprehensible, however, when the intellect on its own
makes the effort to understand it, initially neither agreeing
nor disagreeing but only comprehending. After all, the
emphasis is on understanding these things.

Initially,
you need simply understand them. If you do, then you create
something with the insight the ego has gained that extends
into the night. Then, during the night, you no longer remain
dull as is the case with the merely intellectual attitude
towards the world; then, from the time of falling asleep
until waking up, you dwell in a different content in the
delicately filtered spirituality. Then, you awaken and find
that the possibility has been added — small though it
is each time — of inwardly acquiring what you have
struggled to understand intellectually. With each passing
night, every time we sleep, something of an inner
relationship is added, we acquire an inward connection. Each
time, upon falling asleep, we bear the aftereffect of our
daytime comprehension with us into the world beyond
corporeality. In this way, we acquire a relationship to the
spiritual world, a relationship acquired completely out of
reality. This, however, is the case only if the human being
does not ruin this relationship by means of something with
which he so frequently ruins it today. I have mentioned these
means for ruining spirituality quite often. As you know, many
people are intent on acquiring a certain state of sleepiness
prior to going to sleep; they consume as many glasses of beer
as it takes to have the necessary degree of sleepiness. This
is a quite common practice, especially among
“intelligent” people. In that case, the faculties
I just mentioned certainly cannot develop.

Spirituality
can be researched, however, and this spirituality can indeed
be experienced as well in the manner just described. The
human being has grown away from spirituality. He is capable
of growing into it again. Today, we are only at the beginning
of this process of growing into spirituality. In the past few
centuries, from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth
century when the intellect had reached its highest level, a
certain spirituality has developed, in particular among the
most progressive people in Europe, albeit a spirituality that
has as yet no content. For it is only when we turn to
Imagination that this spirituality receives its first
content. This spirituality, which is filtered to the extreme,
must first receive its content.

At this point
in time, this content is being rejected by the majority of
the people. The world wishes to remain with the filtered
spirituality; it wishes to produce a content derived from the
outer material world. People do not wish to struggle with
their intellect to comprehend the results of insight into the
spiritual world offered. The confessions that follow the
Gospel are, after all, compromises between the intellect and
ancient traditions; they have lost the connecting link.
Ritual means nothing to them. This is why the latter has
gradually disappeared within these confessions. People
arrived at abstract concepts instead of a living
comprehension of, for example, the Transubstantiation. At
most, the simple stories can be told, but no meaning other
than the one that is compatible with a materialistic theology
can be connected with them, namely, that one is dealing with
occurrences that can be linked to the humble man from
Nazareth, and so forth. All this can no longer lead to a
content; it is something that loses all connection with
spirituality.

Thus, the
situation in the world today is such that there is, first of
all a faith that has rejected the intellect and did not
strike any compromise. Due to this, in vast segments of the
population a relationship has been retained, albeit an
instinctive one, to the doctrines and dogmas, the content of
which is no longer accessible to human beings but did flow
out into these dogmas. This segment of the populace also has
retained its living relationship to the cult, to the
ceremonial ritual; it has retained its link to the
sacraments. As depleted as all this is, the ancient
spirituality — the spirituality to which there is still
a connection through dogmas — did once dwell in what
has become a skeleton, a shadow. Among the more recent
Protestant confessions, where a compromise is being tried
out, such a connection is no longer alive. And then we have
those who call themselves quite enlightened and dwell only in
the intellect, which is spiritual but does not wish to grasp
the spirit.

These are the
three streams we confront. In regard to the future, we cannot
count on the fruitfulness of those streams that only tried to
make an external compromise; we cannot count on mere
intellectuality that cannot arrive at any content and
therefore can only lose itself since it does not want to
understand itself. We can only count on the direction in
which these streams are gradually heading, and they are more
and more clearly heading there, namely, we can count on what
has been poured into ancient doctrines and is represented in
the surviving Roman-Catholic Church. We can count on the
attitude that takes the new intellectuality seriously and
deepens it Imaginatively, Inspiratively, and Intuitively,
thus arriving at a new spirituality. The modern world is
becoming divided and estranged in these two contrasting
directions. On the one hand stand people with their
intellect. They are inwardly lazy and do not wish to utilize
this intellect, but they need a content. So they refer to the
dead dogmas. Particularly among intelligent people, who are,
however, mentally indolent, who are in a certain respect
intellectual and Dadaistic, a neo-Catholic movement is making
itself felt that is trying to take hold of the old traditions
that have rigidified in dogmas and that is trying to receive
a content from outside, through historical phenomena but that
rigidifies in historical forms. Based on the intellect, this
trend tries desperately to make some sense of the ancient
content; thus we have intellectual battles that, by means of
the old content, try to prepare their rigidified doctrines in
a new way for the use of human beings.

To cite an
example, on many pages in the newest edition of the magazine
Tat,
[Note 7]
we can observe an intellectual, cramped tendency towards
rigidified doctrines. After all, the publisher, Diederichs,
does everything; he puts everything into categories and on
paper. Thus, he has now dedicated a whole edition of
Tat
to the neo-Catholic movement. It allows us to discern how
cramped people's thoughts are today, how people are
developing inwardly cramped thinking so that they can avoid
having to rouse themselves and can remain mentally lazy in
order to grasp with the intellect whatever moves forward most
indolently.

People
experiment with all this in order to be able to reject this
life-filled striving out of modern intellectuality towards
spirituality, a striving that can and must be grasped. More
and more, things will come to a head in such a way that a
powerful movement with a fascinating, suggestive, hypnotic
effect on all those wishing to remain lazy within the
intellect permeates the world. A Catholic wave is even
pervading the world of intelligent people who wish, however,
to remain lazy within their intelligence. The drowsy souls
just do not realize it. But it must remain unfruitful to
strive for what Oswald Spengler described so vividly in his
Decline of the West.
[Note 8]
One can turn the Occident Catholic, but one will thereby slay
its civilization. This Occident has to concern itself with
waking up, with becoming inwardly active. Its intelligence
must not remain lazy, for this intelligence can rouse itself;
it can fill itself inwardly with an understanding for the new
view of the spirit.

This battle
is in preparation; in fact, it is here — and it is the
main point. In the future, everything else concerning world
views will become crushed between these two streams. We must
turn our attention to this, for what is coming to expression
conceals itself in any number of formulas and forms. Nobody
is living fully in the present who believes that he can make
progress with something that people were perhaps still
dreaming about at the beginning of this century. He alone
lives fully in the present who develops an eye for what
dwells in the two streams described above. We have to be
aware of this. For everything I have discussed a week ago
when I said that nowadays a great number of people love evil
and, purely due to their tendency towards evil, indulge in
slander in the way I described — all this is what must
come before our souls. We must bear in mind that inner
untruthfulness, which expresses itself in the facts —
as I told you — that people, who are supposed to be
strengthened in their Catholic faith, are sent to the
Catholic church in Stuttgart to attend a lecture by General
von Gleich, and that this Catholic general concludes with a
hymn by Luther! There, the two tendencies come together that
care nothing about the confessions but only try to stream
together in the proliferation of lies.

These things
must be noticed today. If this is not done, then one is
asleep and does not participate in what alone can make the
human being today truly human.